All supporting documents can be found here.
The University of Connecticut’s Provost’s office is evaluating approximately 245 programs which are at risk of being cut, according to The Daily Campus. These evaluations are for all “low-completion programs”, defined as those at or below a certain five-year threshold of degree conferrals over the past five years. This includes any program under 100 undergraduate majors, 50 master’s degrees, 25 graduate certificates and 10 doctoral degrees given from August 2018 to May 2023. The full list of all programs under review can be found in publicly accessible documents to anyone with a UConn Net ID. The Daily Campus Editorial Board strongly urges all students to look through the given materials themselves to see if their program is being threatened.
In terms of specifically undergraduate degree programs and concentrations, which the degree completion data defines as “majors”, the programs under review include 26 from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, or about 47% of the 55 total programs offered within the college. It includes 16 of the degree programs within the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, 15 out of the total 16 programs from the Neag School of Education, and eight of the total nine programs in the School of Fine Arts. There are only two programs each under review from the School of Business and the College of Engineering.
The first problem when looking at the numbers is the incredible skew towards humanities programs. Although President Radenka Maric and Provost Anne D’Alleva deny that these evaluations are skewed against any particular field of study, the numbers show disparities in terms of where the potential cuts could come from.
UConn has a responsibility to be more than a school for business and engineering. Although these departments may bring in more outside funding and military-industrial contracts, they are not all this school has to offer, and by no means are they the sole factor in a good education.
UConn’s mission statement is to help “every student grow intellectually and become a contributing member of the state, national, and world communities” and “[enhance] the social, economic, cultural and natural environments of the state and beyond.” Fundamentally, an education in the humanities is a necessary part of both of these goals. How can a school enhance the social or cultural environments of the world if the parts of its education dedicated to those pursuits are degraded to the point of obsoletion? Where are the students of Connecticut supposed to go if they cannot follow their educational desires to the highest degree at the state’s largest public university? The answer lies elsewhere, which will only hurt this state and its prospective students. If UConn, the flagship university of Connecticut, cannot or chooses not to provide an adequate holistic education in this way for its students, it will fail in its distinct responsibility to everyone in this state.
This leads into another crucial point when it comes to understanding this issue. Although these programs are currently only “under review,” with administration officials claiming that this is just an opportunity to make a “strategic plan” on how to increase enrollment with no guarantee of closures, there seems to be no possible answer that does not spell out negative outcomes for these programs. For example, in the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages there were possible plans that included the consolidation of all language majors into one generalized LCL major, which was seemingly supported by the Provost’s office. This would not technically be a closure, but would regardless greatly harm students, making it more difficult to find jobs in those fields. Not only would it hurt the department as it currently stands, but it would worsen its place among other universities in the fight for future students interested in these areas of study, exacerbating the original problem of enrollment which has caused the review.
As for graduate programs, all the above still applies, but it is especially crucial to prevent cuts in this area for the overall health of the university. There are a total of 72 masters programs and 27 doctoral programs currently under evaluation. Although this will affect less students compared to the undergraduate majors, a significant fear of the cuts is losing all the incredible services which these students and workers provide to the larger university. Many graduate students hold teaching assistant positions, maintaining smaller class sizes and a proper teacher to student ratio, which is essential to the success of undergraduate students. Additionally, these factors are heavily important to the already falling ranking of UConn against other colleges. The research which doctoral and graduate students provide is indispensable to UConn’s status as a Research 1 university, one of the biggest sources of pride for this school.
It is clear that closures and consolidations will not be good for this university, and so UConn must reject these answers outright. If the problem is low enrollment numbers, then the answer is increasing accessibility, not making the program more undesirable or eliminating it entirely. The high costs of enrollment would be a great place to start for this school, allowing all students to more reasonably make educational choices that may not lead to six figure salaries directly post-graduation. This should be a priority for any institution which wants to create broad social impact as UConn does, and especially one which is a state institution with a duty to provide for its citizenry. It is clearer now than it has ever been that this university and its community is at a crossroads, there is no one at this school who will not be affected and no shortage of impact that this will have on the broader state of Connecticut. The choices and their consequences have never been more apparent, and The Editorial Board will do its job in pushing for the right one. We hope that you do too.
Here’s what I think is going on. The governor is tired of UConn eating up so much state money. He has aspirations for higher office, and cutting education will endear him to Republican voters. And UConn cannot extract any more money from existing channels (admitting more students, bigger classes, etc.). Because growth is not an option the choice has been made to cut UConn down to size. Gut the majors; cut grad programs; and recreate UConn in the image of West Virginia University. An R2 won’t need nearly as much state funding, and as long as the basketball team keeps winning, they are gambling that students will still want to come here.